Not being Saddam’s Iraq

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq suffered two nightmares – the first when Bush Senior launched the Gulf War, and the second when Bush Junior carried out an invasion that extended into occupation and ultimate horror of civil war that ruined and undid the country. The lessons that I draw from Iraq and Saddam’s strategic experience are very relevant to Pakistan. They are relevant because they were Saddam’s ‘ideas in action’ which when seen in the hindsight tells us altogether a different story. Today, in Pakistan many ideas are in action and history is in the making. It seems that the many actors in Pakistan, like Saddam in Iraq, are on the lookout for short-term benefits and many may eventually, like Saddam, find themselves on the wrong side of the history.

The first lesson one can draw from Saddam’s Iraq is the cost one pays for taking rash decisions. Saddam seemed very happy to take advantage of an unfavourable situation and the chaos that followed after the fall of Shah of Iran. Given enemy’s vulnerability he initiated a war against Iran that he thought he would be able to win. Nine years later when the war ended in 1988 it had cost him $80 billion and half a million lives. When leaders take rash decisions the cost paid for such decisions is enormous.

There were Sunni Arab countries that lent money to Saddam to fight the war against Iran. After the war. Saddam’s major worry was how to repay the debts. He wanted his Arab brothers to write off the money that they lent him to fight the war. When that didn’t happen, he requested them to pump less oil so that the price may rise and he may generate more revenue. When he failed to draw favourable response on both his requests, he felt betrayed and accused Kuwait of stealing oil that belonged to Iraq from Rumaila oil field, located at Kuwait border, about 50km west of Basra in southern Iraq. At 1.5 million barrels a day capacity, it is the world’s third biggest oil producing field and accounts for approximately a third of Iraq’s total oil supply. If Saddam was offered a ‘Marshal Plan’ by the Arab countries that supported him against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war or even by the US or European countries, he may not have resorted to aggression against Kuwait. Leaders disregard logic when their strategic reliance on outside world fails and they find themselves locked in humiliation.

Another lesson that one can draw from Saddam’s Iraq is that you may be a defence and strategic partner and a client state of a superpower, but you cannot permanently rely on its support as the superpower may have its own challenges to encounter or opportunities to meet. A similar thing happened with the erstwhile USSR which was Iraq’s main supplier of arms during its war with Iran. Saddam miscalculated by relying on a USSR veto to defend him at the UNSC. The USSR was going down at that stage and Mikhail Gorbachev was at that time the President and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. Gorbachev was himself fighting a desperate war against time to reform his country and save it, and all his attention was inside the USSR which had a long distance from the Middle East where one of his client states was in trouble. President Bush had sensed Gorbachev’s mood and was sure that if he went to the UN to get the war on Iraq legalised, he would not receive a USSR veto. Tragically for Iraq, not only the Soviets did not use their veto but their foreign minister also made it clear to the US that they would not oppose a military action against Iraq. Was Saddam at some point of time confident of the Soviet support and about the world not being able to build up a military alliance against him because the war could never be declared legal due to the Soviet veto? Saddam didn’t live long enough to answer this question but through his ideas in action, he has left us with one more lesson: absolute reliance on an external partner can be dangerous, as the partner may have the will but not the means under the given circumstances to extend desired support to client state.

Iraq got independence in 1932 when Britain joined three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. Saddam’s predecessor had already spoken to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad about unity between the two countries. Both countries were run by Baath Party, which was founded in Syria to fight the French occupation that lasted till 1946. It was the Baath Party whose ideology revolved around Pan-Arabism and complete opposition to Israel and western imperialism. Saddam’s historic purge of the Baath Party was the beginning of his reign of dictatorship. Famously known as two Baathist dictators, both Saddam and Assad imposed stability in their countries by taking the element of ruthlessness to a new level. And this ruthless rule is what gets highlighted in the last event I quote from Iraq.

This last event necessitates a focus and review of historians to ask one very pertinent question: why did Bush Senior withdraw from Iraq without removing Saddam first? Was it because he didn’t want to get entrenched in the ensuing Iraq’s internal war against Shias and Kurds?

After the ceasefire, Saddam had started a purge against the Kurds and Shias in Iraq and by April 1991 around one thousand Kurds were dying every day. Over half a million Kurds fled and it is said that Saddam killed over 20,000 Kurds in military operations. Bush Senior’s reason not to remove Saddam proved catastrophic for the entire world. Had Saddam been removed in 1991, Iraq may never have threatened the world. And if Iraq had not threatened the world, Saudi Arabia would have found no reason to call for the presence of American forces on the Holy Land. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz bin Baz would then never have approved King Fahad’s decision to throw open the gates of the Kingdom to foreign armies. In response, Osama bin Laden would never have declared war against Saudi Arabia for allowing infields into the Holy Land and maybe the 19 hijackers, 15 of which were Saudis, would never have flown the hijacked planes that slammed the Twin Towers and hit Pentagon. Maybe we would never have seen war on terror, al-Qaeda, ISIS or Taliban’s resurgence.

Given our current circumstances, I think our leaders can learn a lot from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and avoid the fate that has befallen that country.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 26^th, 2023.

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